Peter David: After Earth

Kitai was somewhere in the middle of the crowd, and his positioning was helping to drive home some of the disadvantages he had to face simply because of his physical condition. For starters, despite the solidity of his body, he was still at least a head shorter than most of the other candidates.

Consequently, as the group moved across the rugged terrain, he had to take two steps to keep up with every single step of the others. He worked on maintaining a steady inhaling and exhaling rhythm, but it was definitely not easy. He was supposed to keep a consistent pace, but instead he was practically sprinting to keep up.

A huge river cut through the stunning red mountain range. Both suns were high in the sky, beating down on the planet’s surface. Kitai remembered reading some old science texts from Earth—back when there was an Earth—that swore that life-providing planets could not possibly exist in a two-star system, that any planets would be crushed between the gravity wells of the competing suns. He wondered what those scientists, dead for a thousand years, would have said about Nova Prime.

Don’t let your mind drift. Pay attention to what’s going on around you .

Kitai splashed through the river, sending water spraying, as did the others. However, the river also aided him in his positioning in the crowd. Others slowed down for whatever reason, and Kitai was able to take that opportunity to speed if not into the lead, then at least considerably closer than he had been before. When he hit the land on the other side, he was actually able to advance so that only a couple of the others were now ahead of him.

But he knew that a couple was not enough. When they reached the end of the trail, he had to be first. It was the tradition of the Raige family. Not second, not third—nothing but first would do.

The course of the race took them past a growing station. It was a huge open-fabric structure that shielded the crops from the weather. It allowed moisture to reach the plants but protected them from some of the more threatening weather. The station seemed to spread forever, although he knew that it was actually only a few hundred hectares.

Kitai felt his second wind kicking in and worked to shove his progress into high gear. He saw that Bo was leading the pack and started working to move his legs even faster despite the fact that Bo was built like a large tree. Bo was sixteen years old, farther along than Kitai in every regard: bigger, smarter, faster. But he was also breathing a bit more raggedly than Kitai was. Obviously, the stress of the run was starting to wear him down, and that was spectacular as far as Kitai was concerned.

There was a sudden drop in the terrain directly in front of them. Bo cut to the left to avoid it, and that gave Kitai the opportunity he needed. Rather than cut around the drop, he picked up speed and leaped directly over it. The trick was going to be sticking the landing, and that Kitai was able to do with style. He hit the downsloping ground ahead of him, stumbled only slightly, and then kept going. One leap and just like that, he was finally in the lead.

Bo, now behind him, called out to him, “This isn’t a race, cadet!”

Kitai didn’t care what Bo had to say on the subject. It hadn’t been a race until Bo was behind him. And now that Kitai had grabbed the lead, he had absolutely no intention of allowing it to slip from his grasp.

Instead of heeding Bo’s advice, Kitai stepped it up. His arms pumped, and his legs scissored with greater speed than he had displayed before. Slowly but steadily, he left the rest of the pack behind, separating himself from the leader and those in close proximity to the leader by a good ten or twenty meters.

The finish line was a kilometer ahead, but it might as well have been directly in front of him. He never slowed down for a moment, his feet flying across the terrain. One moment it was in front of him, and then it was behind. Kitai clapped his hands joyously in self-congratulation and then turned and faced the rest of the Ranger cadets, prepared to receive their congratulations as well.

Instead, one by one and then a few at a time, they jogged past him. The triumph he felt in crossing the finish line first was somewhat defeated by the fact that no one seemed the least bit willing to acknowledge it. Sure, granted, no one had actually been timing how long it took the Ranger cadets to cover the distance, but still, would it kill them to acknowledge his personal triumph?

Apparently so. Bo barely afforded him a glance, and then it was just a rolling of his eyes and a slow shake of his head, as if Kitai’s accomplishment meant nothing.

Fine. Be that way . Kitai tried not to let his irritation get the better of him. Sure, the other cadets might not have been at all interested in offering him kudos for his achievement. But certainly the Ranger officers who were watching from a remote distance would have made note of it. They, at least, would understand: It wasn’t enough that Kitai simply passed the course and was designated a Ranger. He had to be the best, and they undoubtedly knew why.

So what if the other cadets were unwilling to care about that? He cared. The Rangers who were judging him would care, too. In the end, that was all he really needed to worry about.

Once the Ranger cadets had a few minutes to gather themselves and recuperate from the run, the Ranger Instructors—RIs, as they were called—gathered them and marched them to a canyon about a mile away. Kitai noticed that a number of the Ranger cadets were chatting with one another intermittently. No one, however, seemed the least bit interested in chatting with him .

Okay, fine. That’s how they want to play it? That’s how we’ll play it .

As they approached the canyon, Kitai could spot RIs at the top. They had small, multiple layered devices in front of them that were giving individual readouts on each of the Rangers. Kitai knew exactly what they were for. They tracked fear levels, because the Rangers were about to be attacked there, down in the twists and turns of the canyon below. The readouts would provide exact details of their reactions, an overall score that would be called the fear prospectus.

Fear was the thing over which Rangers were supposed to triumph. Fear was the weakness that could wind up getting a Ranger killed. And they all knew why.

It was because the Ursa were sensitive to fear in their prey. They could smell it.

Over the last few hundred years the Skrel had put a half dozen or so different generations of Ursa up against humanity, and the most recent incarnations of the creatures had been the most formidable that humans had ever faced. Six-legged monsters they were, with huge maws full of teeth, not to mention the ability to blend in so perfectly with their backgrounds that they were practically invisible.

But it was their ability to smell the pheromones that denote fear, to lock on with unswerving concentration, that made them the deadliest of creatures.

So there was no ability more valuable to a Ranger than the mastery of one’s fear. More important than skill with the cutlass, more important than just about anything. That was why Kitai was determined to nail this part of the testing. This, more than anything, was going to determine his relative viability as a Ranger, and there was no way in hell he was going to screw it up.

The Rangers gathered at the entrance to the valley. Some were glancing up toward the RIs who were going to be monitoring them. Kitai was not. He’d already seen them and had buried that knowledge deep in the back of his mind. The presence of the RIs was no longer of any consequence to him. Only the challenges they would be facing in the valley mattered.

“All right, cadets,” called an RI who was down in the valley with them. “Take your equipment.”